News that Stays Newz, or How I Spent Bad Poetry Day

“It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” —WCW
***
Yesterday, April 18th, was, believe it or not, Bad Poetry Day, and to “celebrate” I took a break from dissertation writing/research and spent a good part of the afternoon—to quote the catchy subtitle of Dan Hoy’s 2006 anti-flarf essay—“fucking around on the Internet.”

Then I stumbled upon Lance Newman’s fascinating blogzine 3by3by3which was launched as a “public service” in 2006, and I was immediately tempted by the playful but also challenging simplicity of the project:

From Tristan Tzara’s Dadaist poem to Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Man-Moth” (which was inspired by a newspaper misprint), 20th Century poetry is rife with creative engagements with the news. In fact, Dr. Williams conceived the modernist epic (like his magisterial Paterson) to be the poet’s corrective response to the bulk and banality of the modern news: “The epic poem would be our ‘newspaper,’ …The epic if you please is what we’re after, but not the lyric-epic sing-song. It must be a concise sharpshooting epic style. Machine gun style. Facts, facts, facts, tearing into us to blast away our stinking flesh of news.” And from Mark Nowak’s working class haibuns in Shut Up Shut Down (2004), which are collaged from local newspaper articles, to Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day (2003), which transforms an entire issue of The New York Times into an immense, parodic novel, some of the most interesting volumes of recent contemporary poetry use the newspaper as raw substrate.

Mr. President, you did consider a robot dog?
After that robotic pooch was found guilty of second-degree
murder for lovin’ an actress to death from behind?

The Tuesday “blue plate” special was to write a series of 3 linked hay(na)ku (an elegantly minimalist form (a bit like the tip of an Oulipian “snowball”) inaugurated by poet and publisher Eileen Tabios in 2003 on Philippine Independence Day), so I decided to give it a whirl…at the very least, I thought, I can come up with an outrageously bad poem in the spirit of the “holiday.” Yet while I had in mind a humorous poem, the form pulled me in another direction.

I picked the first article “European Regulators Examine Reports of Exploding iPhones” because I thought it might be provocatively juxtaposed with recent bombings in Baghdad. But, using such a minimalist form, I interestingly wound up with a kind of compressed history of civilization—primitive man becomes homo linguisticus (“murmurs / … / in the wilderness”), then becomes what Freud has called a “prosthetic God” (“confused / devices abuzz”), and finally politically sidesteps dire issues such as global warming (“even extinction / could be negotiated”).

In short, I found Newman’s “public service” to be quite important as it encourages us to poetically and critically respond to the news which, so many times, gives us the feeling of helplessness. I’m thinking of Anne Waldman’s long poem Iovis which depicts an all too familiar scene: “She spreads the documents about her, and bows her head. She feels a burden to sustain the plan. The society is crumbling around her. She can barely withstand the daily news.” One way to respond is to “sustain the plan” of a long poem—and here long poems from Paterson to Iovis can be seen as a way to manage the disastrous news of a crumbling modernity. Another way is to write for 3by3by3—I highly recommend it.

About:

Michael Leong’s poetry career began in the sixth grade when he won his first poetry prize in Mr. Harrison’s class for a haiku about a snake. Since then, he has received degrees in English and Creative Writing from Dartmouth College, Sarah Lawrence College, and Rutgers University and was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in journals such as Hotel Amerika, Interim, jubilat, Lana Turner, and New American Writing and have been anthologized in The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing (Lake Forest College Press, 2013), and Best American Experimental Writing 2018 (Wesleyan University Press, 2018). He is the author of four volumes of poetry, e.s.p. (Silenced Press, 2009), Cutting Time with a Knife (Black Square Editions, 2012), Who Unfolded My Origami Brain?(Fence Digital, 2017), and Words on Edge (Black Square Editions, 2018), as well as a translation of the Chilean poet Estela Lamat,I, the Worst of All (BlazeVOX [books], 2009). His monograph Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press in Spring 2020. He works in the School of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts.

Contact: michael.c.leong@gmail.com

Pages

Books:

Words on Edge (Black Square Editions, 2018)

[“Working out a necessary and constantly evolving counterintuition–uneasy, agitated, restless and ceaselessly inventive–Michael Leong’s Words on Edge clocks the alarm of those who ‘wake late’ in a world of fragments and found materials. Bricoleur of the ‘jagged, ad hoc equation’ that is the contemporary, the poet constellates a spacious, ever-enlarging structure from a heap of broken posterities to make space for ‘the first blossoms of wild meaning.’ The assertions are fresh, tragicomic, and engaging, and the ongoing effort to accurately describe (and affect) a transforming situation is thrilling: this is work that leads us toward ‘a future collapse into / a full state of wakefulness.’ Don’t wait!” -Laura Mullen]

[“Michael Leong’s poetry is exquisite. We say something is exquisite when it is alluring and elegant, but also when it is razor-fine, when it has an edge, and that edge might be used to slice open a section of air and pull something out of it that hadn’t existed before, something that we did not know existed, something that existed outside of language and was conjured into being by an unorthodox employment of that very same language. This is called invention, and can lead to great and wonderful things, what André Breton would call the marvelous.” -John Olson]

[“Leong’s glowing hieroglyphs show that the poetic Word emerges––as irony from iron––from the whirled atoms of the World itself. Indeed, Leong redefines the space-time of the page as a furnace of pure imagination, where the cadaver of modernist poetics is smelted with black humor…” -Andrew Joron]

[“Recalling the poetry of Ginsberg, Lamat knows how to set words free.”
–Handbook of Latin American Studies]

Chapbooks:

Li Po Meets Oulipo (Belladonna*, 2015)

Fruits and Flowers and Animals and Lands and Seas Do Open (Burnside Review Press, 2015)

[Winner of the 2014 Burnside Review Chapbook Contest]

[“Michael Leong’s vocabulary is totally stuffed/ multiplying in mirrors/ scattered over hillsides/ bubbling right over the top, and he’s going to give it all to you—he’s generous. He’s generous and funny and a little troubled—and “a little troubled” is, of course, the most logical and authentic response we could hope for anyone who’s examining life and poetry and personhood and artist-ness. This book is so enjoyable—like I said, giving and funny, but also very unlike anything I’ve read lately. It promptly wins the reader over.” – Hannah Gamble]

Words on Edge (Plan B Press, 2012)

[Winner of the 2012 Plan B Press Poetry Chapbook Contest]

[“This is work that rubs the found language of the web up against the language of the everyday world. Many of the forms are precise, inventive, and informed.” -Rob Fitterman]

[“…what particularly satisfies about Leong’s book is that the ‘cover version’ poems he produces, almost without exception, are really kind of beautiful and interesting in their own right, and go way beyond wacky or quirky into something rather pleasing and oddly profound.” -Chris Goode]